tion that a house divided
against itself can not stand, and that the Republic can not
permanently exist half slave and half free; and they urged that
this baptism of fire and blood would be impious if the cause which
produced it should be spared to canker the heart of the nation
anew, and repeat its diabolical deeds. A Union with slavery spared
and reinstated would not be worth the cost of saving it. To argue
that we were fighting for a political abstraction called the Union,
and not for the destruction of slavery, was to affront common sense,
since nothing but slavery had brought the Union into peril, and
nothing could make sure the fruits of the war but the removal of
its cause. It was to delude ourselves with mere phrases, and
conduct the war on false pretenses. It was to rival the folly of
the rebels, who always asservated that they were not fighting for
slavery, but only for the right of local self government, when the
whole world knew the contrary. These ideas, variously presented
and illustrated, found manifold expression in innumerable Congressional
speeches and in the newspapers of the Northern States, and a month
later brought forth the President's proclamation of the twenty-
second of September, giving the insurgents notice that on the first
day of January following he would issue his proclamation of general
emancipation, if they did not in the meantime lay down their arms.
The course of events and the pressure of opinion were at last
forcing him to see that the nation was wrestling with slavery in
arms; that its destruction was not a debatable and distant alternative,
but a pressing and absolute necessity; and that his Border State
policy, through which he had so long tried to pet and please the
power that held the nation by the throat, was a cruel and fatal
mistake. This power, however, had so completely woven itself into
the whole fabric of American society and institutions, and had so
long fed upon the virtue of our public men, that the Administration
was not yet prepared to divorce itself entirely from the madness
that still enthralled the conservative element of the Republican
party.

It was during this year that a formidable effort was made by the
old Whig element in the Republican party to disband the organization
and form a new one, called the "Union party." They were disposed
to blame the Abolitionists for the halting march of events, and to
run away from the real issues of the conflict. T